I use Avs4You software to convert videos.
There are so many options. How can I tell which is best for compression with reasonable quality? Been looking for a good article that logically arranges them. Obviously smaller size, and slower frame rates compress more, but how to rate them without trying each. Been there, done that, still not definitive answers.

Anonymous

April 11, 2010 at 3:22 pm

Ok, I took some time to make a small presentation. From what is here note: for what I am doing the Optimal quality FLV format achieves 10x size reduction and takes 1/15th as much time to convert as WMV at 29fps. The drop in conversion time is significant (90 sec to 6 sec WOW!!!), otherwise I would use the WMV . Quality is a little less, but for what I am doing, looks just fine (my 84 year old mom will know see difference). This means I can send a 2 minute video in Yahoo mail and a 5 minute in G-mail.

Aibek: Your references were just superb. Wish that article would have come up when I searched. Now I know what most of the terminology means.

Anonymous

April 11, 2010 at 1:17 pm

Thank you both for responding.

Taty: what got me started was trying to send an email of my grand-kids to my brother so he could show it to my mother. No more money for DVD's.

Aibek: Thank you for your reference. I will go thru it in detail. Being an unemployed computer guru (MS Visual Studio Programmer) I have plenty of time.

Now for some more results.

I found a .wmv set up that reduced size by another factor of 2. (total size reduction is now 1/14th original). It is "Windows Media Advanced 9" on the menu offered. I keep the frame size same as input. Frame Rate is 29,97 and bit rate 720. (whatever that means). Quality remains very good but the .wmv format takes 3x as long to encode. I used to use Nero, but those files came out 10x bigger!! Logged it with them and they say they were able to reproduce it, but alas, never did get a resolution.

I will report back on what I find. (obviously if you have a super high res movie, then you will not get these results.)

The main question is, what are you compressing it for? Compression for email is vastly different from compression for streaming video or website use. Which is obviously different from compression for computer play. Which compression do you need?

Anonymous

April 9, 2010 at 10:26 pm

Well I took a small movie and started playing with it. Found nothing too good in .mpg and .avi, but .mp4 achieved compression (movie directly from camera) by factor of 7 (ie filesize after was 1/7th (approx) of that before.) So for now will use that to get my files small enough to e-mail. Only problem is .mp4 is not universally displayed on windows machines and needs codec. But that is available in K-lite package.